OpenAI looks to tie purchasing in with AI searches

Buyers are increasingly turning to AI to help them make their purchasing decisions, and OpenAI is looking to make the process easier. The company is taking steps that would allow customers to not only choose products within ChatGPT, but complete the purchase as well. However, there may be still some way to go before organizations look to adopt the new technology.

Research organization Bain & Co found that AI shopping prompts rose by 25 percent in the first half of 2025, although this still represented a small number of users. However, there are clear indications that the use of AI in purchasing decisions is on the rise, so there is little surprise that vendors want to make the buying process easier.

OpenAI laid out its first steps in that direction in a statement that said, “US ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Free users can now buy directly from US Etsy sellers right in chat, with over a million Shopify merchants, like Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx, and Vuori, coming soon.“

The company is also making its Agentic Commerce Protocol, the technology that powers Instant Checkout, available as an open source tool, enabling vendors to integrate it into their systems.

However, according to Forrester VP Principal Analyst Sucharita Kodali, merchants are not going to be in a rush to adopt this. “I think most retailers will pass until their competitors do it first. Usually the way this goes down is that some hard-on-its-luck D-list distressed company will agree to be a pilot partner, but even to get that far, OpenAI will need to pay them. Everyone else will eagerly watch to see if this will change D-list company’s fortunes and when it doesn’t, they will quietly stop their efforts and no one will remember it.”

She pointed out that there may some other details to iron out. “The more important question is what is the revenue share and data that OpenAI is requesting/keeping for this? It looks like OpenAI is saying this: ‘Merchants pay a small fee on completed purchases.’ For many, that could be a deal breaker until it is proven.”

Retail analyst and publisher of Retail Technology Miya Knights said that there were other issues as stake as well. She said that any company wanting to benefit from the technology needs to be discovered first. “The primary consideration is how highly ranked your site may be on other authoritative sites for AI search. For example, a restaurant will need to rank well and have good reviews on TripAdvisor and TopTable, among others, before ChatGPT will include it in its recommended search results.”

She also pointed out that OpenAI’s initiative isn’t entirely new; other companies have the ability to complete transactions within an AI search engine, so the customer doesn’t even have to visit the retailer’s site. “Perplexity AI has had a head start for a while, but it doesn’t have the user base of [its] competitors, such as ChatGPT or Gemini, which are quickly catching up,” she said.

OpenAI claims that transactions will be straightforward. When a buyer uses ChatGPT to purchase a product, all the order details are sent to the merchant’s backend using Agentic Commerce Protocol. The retailer accepts or declines the order, processes the payment via their existing provider, and handles fulfillment itself. It then passes the result back to ChatGPT for display to the buyer.

Forrester’s Kodali, however, envisions a lot of difficulties for companies looking to use the OpenAI agent, as there would be considerable work to do. She said that the way OpenAI has designed its website, as if it owns the transaction, is something she describes as a typical approach that other companies, including Facebook and Google, have tried and failed to execute in the past.

CIOs faced with the task of trying to integrate the OpenAI data feed into their systems would have their work cut out for them. She said that OpenAI makes it sound straightforward, but she sees issues with the process of trying to fulfill transactions on the fly. “You need to have a real-time hook into the retailer’s visible pages. Then if a transaction occurs, it’s a good idea for ChatGPT to also pass that to the company’s order management system in real time.”

It remains to be seen whether OpenAI’s vision is shared by retailers. “Ultimately, every large tech company that wants to be a marketplace usually just reverts to linking back to the retailer. That would be a much easier integration for everyone, especially the retailer, because they can just hire a marketing company that wants to be an ‘answer engine optimization’ provider,” said Kodali.